5 Tips That Help New Project Managers To Start A Project Successfully

As a new project manager, you may be afraid of starting your first project. But that’s ok. Everyone experiences that when building a new career. We can assure you that if you have vast knowledge in project management and if you apply the tips given in this article, you will start a project successfully. 

5 Tips That Help New Project Managers To Start A Project Successfully

1. Set Clear Goals

Before you start, you should analyze the data you have and determine what you want to accomplish with the current project. You should set SMART goals – the goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Knowing your goals, you will find it easier to stay within a given budget, provide quality work, and complete work on time.

2. Share Your Expectations With Your Team

If you want to start your project successfully, you should explain to your team members what results you expect. It means you should define roles and responsibilities, set deadlines, and clearly outline communication plan objectives.

Also, it’s highly recommended to write a project scope statement. If you have never done it before, you can get assistance from professional writers at TrustMyPaper.

3. Manage Meetings Wisely

As a project manager, you know that too many meetings negatively affect productivity and morale. So you should set up new meetings only when they are 100% necessary. If you can share the specific information with your team via emails or with the help of project planning software, you shouldn’t waste your time on arranging a new meeting.

Also, you should always make sure the key players can attend the meeting. Why? Because there’s no sense to discuss important questions without them. 

4. Outline Potential Risks

Obviously, you know that it’s impossible to control everything. And you understand that bad weather, technology flubs, or any other force major events may negatively affect your project. 

“The only right thing you can do for your project and your team is to prepare for the unexpected. Yes, you can’t prevent all the risks. But you can lessen the potential impact of hazards,” says Michelle Williams, a project manager at GrabMyEssay.

5. Choose The Right Tools To Use

Depending on the size of your team and the complexity of the project, you may consider different project management tools to use. If you choose the right tool, you will boost your productivity and help your team to finish the project on time.

Just in the way an artist needs high-quality brushes to complete the painting, a project manager needs specific tools to complete the project. So make sure that you’ve picked a suitable “instrument” that will help you to achieve the results you expect.

These tips for new project managers are simple yet effective. And if you apply them in the right way, you will lead your team to success. So don’t be afraid to start your first project and get your work done.

Omer Elkhatab Elbuluk Reviewed Our PMI PMP Course

Omer Elkhatab Elbuluk is currently working as a Planning and Technical Support Supervisor at Future Technology Trading with more than 3 years of experience. His field of expertise includes project management, Systems Engineering, Project Planning, and Manufacturing. He can work with tools and technologies such as Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks. Omer holds various certifications including:

  • Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
  • PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)
  • KAIZEN Management System Practitioner
  • Project Management Professional (PMI-PMP)
  • PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)

He has reviewed our PMI PMP course and provided his valuable feedback. Please read it here:

Omer Elkhatab Elbuluk Reviewed Our PMI PMP Course

If you are ambitious, self-motivated and really want to learn then, uCertify is the best place to find everything for your IT certification with a variety of different courses.

I have enrolled to uCertify PMP PMBOK course and was very much impressed by the platform and the course. If you learn each and every topic properly by the concept provided by uCertify then you will surely pass your certification in the first attempt.”

To read the complete post, please click here.

Thank you, Omer, we are more than happy to have your honest and valuable feedback on our course.

To know more about Omer Elkhatab Elbuluk, contact via his LinkedIn profile.

Check Out The 5 Tips For New Project Managers

Becoming a successful project manager is difficult but not impossible. All you need is the skills and knowledge that range from being a tactical problem solver to reading the nuances of human behavior. If you’re just getting started as a project management professional, then know that the job is going to be very difficult! To help excel your way to a brilliant career, here are a few tips for new project managers. 

Check Out The 5 Tips For New Project Managers

1. Listen And Engage 

This is the most important tip for a project manager because you can’t learn if you don’t listen. The three main things that you should do to smoothly run your project are paying attention to the landscape of your team; study your clients and customers; start to recognize the strengths of your teammates.

2. Be A Problem Solver

Junior project managers are less efficient in analyzing dependencies and identifying risks. So, you must have preemptive problem-solving skills to contribute to your team. 

3. Be A Good Team Player 

As a new project manager, you want to serve your team in your project’s best interest as well as learn how to optimize your team members’ expertise. Becoming a good team player will help you accomplish these two tasks. 

4. Understand Your Project Management Tools

You should have a strong understanding of the tool you are using for the collaborative management of the project schedule and its other important factors. You should know how to optimize the platform and encourage team members to participate.

5.Understand The Demands Of Your customer

One of the most important jobs of a project manager is to understand a customer’s goals, vision, and mission. Project Managers should also identify what a customer cares about and how they like to communicate. If you can react to your customers in a meaningful way then it can transform your organization.

These are just a few tips for new project managers, but there is a lot more you can do. Getting a Project Management certification can be a great kick start to your career in this field and help you stand out. Good Luck!

Check Out The Popular PMO Training Trends

Organizations these days get a higher rate of project success by establishing a Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO within an organization is a department that sets and handles processes by which projects are managed. 

The PMO increases the accuracy of projects within a defined resource, budget, and schedule. This leads to cost savings. Cost savings are specific when accuracy comes into the equation. A PMO also makes certain that organizations develop and apply process across the board which leads to enhancement in project management skills and uniformity in a project team. These processes develop through data collection and analysis, reporting, templates, communication, and more. A PMO helps in better decision making by connecting schemes together with the organization’s results that lead to success within their projects. PMO resolves an organization’s resourcing issues by examining the skills of the project managers. Its office has an overall view of an organization’s projects portfolio and therefore is able to support the high-level management team.

49% of PMOs provide project management training. Check out some of the popular PMO training trends and their percentage:

PMO Training Trends

PM basics
85%

PM software and tools
67%

Leadership skills
55%

Advanced PM skills
51%

PMP prep
42%

Business alignment
34%

PM certificates
22%

So, it is very important for a PMO that their organization get tangible and meaningful business benefits. To achieve this, the office must not only need good processes and good people but also supporting technology. However, there are five biggest barriers to any PMO success:

  • Some PMOs have poor resource management capabilities
  • Values added by PMO are challenging to prove
  • PMO have not enough time and resources for strategic activities
  • PMOs are perceived as unnecessary overhead in certain organizations
  • PMOs have resistance to change within the organization

Therefore, when a PMO is introduced into an organization it is important that it is done in a manner that balances the existing structure of the organization. An effective PMO provides benefits, ensures efficiency, and will significantly improve project success rate. Want to learn more about PMOs skills and abilities? Check out the latest PMP certification course offered by uCertify.

5 Project Management Tips for Content Marketers

Most of the time, marketers are believed to be creative geniuses who are able to produce ideas by putting their innovative skills to work, without possessing too much organizational or project management talents.

While this can be true in some cases, as even John William Gardner once said that “Creative minds are rarely tidy”, it is precisely creativity that can help the creative content marketers turn into strong project managers. With a little bit of discipline, planning, and teamwork, combined with your creativity, you can turn project management into a piece of cake.

5 Project Management Tips For Creative Content Marketers

Below are some tips to help you achieve your goals and keep your team focused.

Don’t Over-complicate Things

The road to reaching the best results is often the simplest one. When developing a project, you don’t have to come up with complex charts and plans, but simply create a formula and stick to it. A simple only needs to contain an outline of the entire development of the project, split up into steps. This is as simple as it can get:

  • Initiate: Determining what type of project is best for marketing your business, based on your goals;
  • Plan: After deciding on your project, it’s time to outline how you are going to develop it;
  • Execute: This phase involves putting everything into motion towards creating the project;
  • Monitor and control: Constantly reviewing the team’s progress;
  • Close: Reviewing how the project helped your business grow.  

Have Clearly Defined Goals

In order for you and your team to know what type of projects are worth putting your effort into, you need to have clear goals and be aware of what you want to achieve. For example, if your main goals are to increase traffic and subscribers, while also build a larger customer base, you need to put all your time end effort into projects that will help your business achieve that.

Make sure to keep your goals reasonable and realistic, otherwise, you might find yourself biting more than you can chew. If you present your team with a list of 15 projects that need to be accomplished by the end of the week, they might not know exactly where and how to start working towards them. And, most importantly, they might not know which of them are going to better help the business achieve the set goals.  

This is why prioritizing is extremely important. To prioritize your project, you can choose a simple rating method, where you can list all your projects and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. “5” means the project will significantly help you achieve your goals, while “1” means it can probably wait a bit more.

Evaluate Your Resources

After you have decided on a project, it is time to determine what resources go into its development. This includes tools and budget, as well as talent. Your project should not be influenced by the resources, but the other way around.

“Projects that could really impress your audience should not be set aside, just because you don’t consider you have the necessary resources. Instead, work towards obtaining them. This is where the creative genius inside you has to come out and do what it knows best: get creative,” says James Daily, head of the content department at FlashEssay.

Keep in mind that sometimes, it is better to concentrate all your resources towards a project that could drive immense growth for your business, rather than divide them into multiple projects that will only drive moderate growth.

Schedule Your Tasks

When working at a project, you might find it more effective to break the project into separate tasks and set deadlines for them. This way, you can focus on finishing them in order of importance for the main project.

Hold a meeting with the entire team involved in the project execution and start splitting the tasks based on each member’s skills. This way, you can make sure that everyone is contributing to the project in the best possible way. Make sure to ask for time estimates as soon as everyone knows what their task is, in order to make sure you will hit your deadline.

It might be best to plan everything with a calendar that everyone has access to, in order to get things done in a more effective way. This will ensure that everybody knows exactly when the deadline is, what their tasks are what other important events might happen along the way. On the other hand, this will give you a clear view and, in case something does not go as planned, you will know whom you need to talk to.

Plan Constant Reviews

In order to avoid unplanned situations, such as one member of the team not completing their task, you need to constantly review the progress.

“Simply asking everybody where they are with their task can sometimes be enough to give you a clear idea, but it is better to schedule regular meetings, in order to gather the whole team and receive updates on their progress. Based on the deadline, the meetings can be scheduled daily, twice a week or even weekly,” advises Veronica Wright, CEO at Resumes Centre.

Good creative content gets done better when you have a clear strategy in mind, and by applying project management methodologies, you can achieve exactly that and much more. This way, deadlines will not be a scary date on a calendar anymore, but a clear milestone towards your final project.